Android, Windows Phone bosses downplay Apple's Siri threat - Page 3

there tech is weak siri is the future and
don't you think SJ made a lockout deal to keep it from others
that's the advantage of using your $$$ to protect your future
funny it comes out now
my thoughts
these bozos (sorry bozo) checked with nuance and found a barrier to them implimenting this tech i mean stealing the tech and its a no go

SJ didn't leave this world without a way to protect his baby this is why we didn 't get the ip4s in june he was still in negotiations protecting his baby

Lay off Windows and Android bosses, people! In case you've forgotten, Apple is no stranger to such tactics. Remember when Steve Jobs said that 7-inch tablet makers should ship their tablets with a nail file? How about when he he went on AllThingsD and trashed Adobe and Flash?

Er, the difference is, he was right...

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It's how the game is played. Executives are supposed to talk up their product and their strategy. They're supposed to poke holes in competitor's products/strategies.

Sure - I don't mind that. It's just that this "hole poking" is week and stupid.

Your phone shouldn't be a personal assistant? Really? And you expect people to not call him out for such an inane comment?

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Whether he's right or not is irrelevant.

Wow.

Just wow.

I'm so glad sycophants such as yourself are in the minority. Otherwise what a lame world it would be to live in.

2) When Apple releases a 7" iPad with the same version of iOS designed for the 10" iPad then you'll have a soapbox on which to stand.

Just as Jobs may have been right saying that the iOS version at the time would not be suited for a 7'' device, Rubin may be implying that the current voice recognition capabilities of Android would not grant adequate user experience upon further integration in the system. Clearly, things may change in both situations, with advancements in the respective underlying technologies.

For that matter, a lot of those features have been on the iPhone for a while. For instance, you could already tell your iPhone to make calls. The difference with voice recognition to date is you had to remember a set of commands. With Siri you don't. There is a video online with a guy having a eight minute conversation with Siri. The guy often would ask Siri the same question multiple times. Siri would understand the question has already been asked and respond accordingly.

THe usefulness will be depend on the user, but I see it being pretty useful. I particularly like Siri's ability to use your location to do things like remind you of something. For example, tell you to pick up groceries when you pass a certain street, or call somebody at a certain location. It also learns based on the information it gathers on the user.

Google wasn't dissing Siri because it understands the potential. Siri is also a tool Apple is using to wean iPhone users off of Google as it will prefer other third party services like yelp.

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Originally Posted by MaroonMushroom

A lot of these features have been available on Android for quite a while. As in, with a single button press, I can tell my phone to call anyone, to send a text message, or to start voice navigation.

Everything else that Siri has is usually just a glorified Google search.

And make no mistake, Dragon Naturally Speaking is a far more advanced speech-to-text technology than what's in Siri (it does, of course, lack the "AI").

Er, you do know Apple licensed the speech-to-text engine in Siri from Nuance - the makers of Dragon?

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There's a novelty factor here that is selling phones. Will it be something everyone can't live without a year from now? Not a chance. For the vast majority of people anyway.

That's a pretty bold statement. I can see myself using it every time I am commuting in my car (which thankfully is only a few days a week these days). With laws against cell phone use propagating (heck, in Maryland touching your phone while in the car - even while stopped at a stoplight - is now a primary offense for which police can stop you for) technology like Siri is going to become a ubiquitous part of everyone's daily life.

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The most useful features of it (dictating texts, etc) have been standard features in most smartphones for a while.

With sucky implementations that make them a novelty. Siri has enough "extra" functionality to make it a stand alone and useable feature.

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The other parts of it are pure showmanship. Apple put a ton of effort into things like the little jokes it has because they know it'll give them publicity. They knew it'd drive sales. It's the superficial sugarcoating on the phone to give it something stronger to differentiate from the prior iPhone 4 (which is why it's artificially limited from running on anything other than the 4S).

What you pan as showmanship is the differentiator that makes Siri something useful and appealing for daily use.

Your complaints ring hollow and sound like sour grapes - your not related or working for Rubin?

The only point I may concede to you is the iPhone 4S restriction. However I suspect upon further teardown of the 4S we will see some suspicious enhancements to the microphones and more importantly, exploitation of the A5 for enhanced audio processing to enhance Siri's recognition capabilities.

If Apple was so concerned about forcing obsolescence in their phones, they wouldn't have been the first and most aggressive in the industry for pushing OS updates out to older phones. Accusing them of such makes for sensationalistic headlines, but Apple has shown time and time again that they are pretty deliberate in their decisions, and the vast majority of the time they are directly driven by user experience.

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Many of you think the world of it right now, but once the novelty wears off (and make no mistake, it will), you'll probably want to forget about all of this hype you bought into. It's just not good enough -- it's not consistent enough, it's not reliable enough. Even if it fails 1 out of 10 times to correctly do what I ask of it, that's too much for me and most people.

Huh? What an inane statement. If it fails when I'm trying to schedule an appointment I just start over. Heck, if it fails one in 10 times, that will be far less than me trying to type on a keyboard on a mobile device (any mobile device, not just an iPhone) while driving in a car (which isn't a good idea in the first place) or walking around.

I think you need to get out of your box and walk on the lawn more than trying to keep people off of it.

How sad to live in your world.... I don't need "research" to tell me how useful something is - I can see myself using Siri daily. Just like many analysts panned the first iPhone, claiming that people wouldn't be able to find enough usability in it to justify the "insane" monthly phone contracts. Well, I will gladly pay my $70 a month to AT&T as the iPhone is the device I use more than any other in my life. It's my constant companion and true information appliance. Siri takes it to the next level, enabling me to use my iPhone in even more situations where it wouldn't be practical otherwise.

It's going to be far from a novelty - it's going to be another significant input paradigm, right up there with multi-touch (which was also panned as a novelty and fad. Hmm, sounds familiar!)

Android has had voice command capabilities like forever. iOS's version, good as it is, is just playing catch-up.

Unless Siri works near flawlessly, the novelty will wear off and only a few will use it.

Huh? where do all these fandrones come from? No phone has anything remotely close to Siri. Siri is not just simple voice translation. Try this on your phone: "Schedule an appointment for today at 3pm. Invite my wife, Jack, and Lisa." What does your phone do?

Apple bought Siri. Siri was a spinoff of a government research project. Apple pulled Siri from the iOS store and aborted the almost-released Android version of it.

Wow, reading through your posts it's clear - it's sour grapes.

Yup, Apple bought Siri - and then took it to the next level. This time we can clearly see it. As someone who regularly used the Siri app on the iPhone, it's very obvious that this iteration of Siri is VERY different.

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Let's not be victims of hyperbole.

Indeed - you may wish to actually try using it for more than a few days before continuing to pan it. But then again that means you would have to put down your precious Android phone and/or be open minded for more than a few seconds

I suspect this is what is burning Apple's competitors and Android apologists more than anything:

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While Apple's competitors may doubt Siri's usefulness, millions of customers have already voted with their wallets.

Huh? where do all these fandrones come from? No phone has anything remotely close to Siri. Siri is not just simple voice translation. Try this on your phone: "Schedule an appointment for today at 3pm. Invite my wife, Jack, and Lisa." What does your phone do?

Pay no attention to ConradJoe, he's just an old troll best known as tekstud. He keeps getting banned and coming back under a new name.

Using voice to interact with your phone is not a new concept to android.

I guess "interact" is in the eye of the beholder, but Android's "interaction" (like Apple's previous voice control) was just as useful as the "voice control" from cell phones in the 90's. The differentiator is Siri's ability to understand context and naturally pull commands out of speech without having to follow rigid rules of interaction.

Like most things Apple, the previous implementations made sense only to techies and geeks who were comfortable with their limitations. The Apple version is accessible and comfortable to all.

So yes, it may not be a big deal to you - but it is a big deal to the rest of the people on the planet.

Android has had voice command capabilities like forever. iOS's version, good as it is, is just playing catch-up.

Uh, no and no.

Even Rubin didn't claim that they were the same. I won't even say nice try because it wasn't. Just lame denial. But hey, stick with that! And when Google unveils their own natural language processing in the future, just remember this and be sure to criticize them for wasting their time "improving" something that is already the same as what they have

Wow to the few here (you shall remain nameless, but you know who you are) who think Siri is only a novelty or the same as the Droid system, you are missing the point totally.

The point of Siri is that you can do more with out adhering to the regimented commands of other voice systems, that you can by voice change the nature of your search with out having to restate everything. I like that I can ask for some Thai food and get locations by review or location based on how I ask. I like how I can set an event and be warned if it overlaps with existing events. Things like the reminder alerts based on location are really the core of Siri.

The personality and the jokes are just the fluff. Some people will only see that and call it a shiny toy and miss out. Style with substance does not equal lack of substance. But hey some people like to be wrong I guess.

To the Droid Noid I say ha let's see what you have to say in six months when the clone is out.

It's always been a good sign for an Apple product when it's downplayed by the competition.

And btw the argument that people won't talk to Siri in public is so. Incredibly. Shortsighted.
What's the difference with talking to your phone like people have been doing for more than a decade now? And when that started out, the same stupid thing was said about cell phones in general.

I think it would have been more of a threat if Apple had waited until they got it out of beta. I've mainly head reviews and comments of it just not understanding people and the fact half the features don't work outside the US is a bit of a let down.

Meh - call me selfish, but I'll enjoy it in the US just fine, thank you. You can deny it to yourself instead of having Apple do it for you if your that worked up about it still being a little rough outside the US.

At least it's out there and useful for the instances is can be useful! It will catch up. Apple will improve it.

The glass is half full, not half empty! Sheesh, what is with people and the constant pessimism? This is the most amazing time in the history of the world to be alive but nothing is good enough?

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Once people have used it and found it not to be 100% working yet, they just give up and will probably never try again.

If that was true Windows would have died a long time ago

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It was a nice idea, ultimately best for sending messages while driving but I would agree it's not much of a threat. It will never become the standard way of using your phone

Really? Just like people prefer physical buttons and virtual keyboards will never take off? Fascinating.

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the same as people don't control there PC's via voice despite it also being perfectly possible. I also think the same for the next Xbox update, people will be able to control the whole Xbox dashbord via voice, but they will still use the controller.

Er, my PC and Xbox aren't in my car when I can't use my hands on my phone. You might try comparing like with like next time. You'll get better results.

I remember reading that it, along with Apple computers, were called just toys. Funny how many still call Apple products toys and for fun only.

Oh, if I only had a nickel for every time I've heard someone call the Mac a toy computer, then in their next breath deride it because it doesn't have any many available games as their Windows PC.

Siri is amazing, and it's only going to get better as Apple adds to its capabilities, and as it learns from everyone using it. It's going to just keep improving, right up to the day it becomes self aware and kills us all.

But seriously, within a day I had already outsourced my short-term memory to the Reminders app, because it was so easy to just hold a button for a few seconds and tell Siri to remember something for me-- way better than opening up an app and typing something in, because it takes almost no effort.

The only difference between Google's voice commands/voice control and Siri is the attempted AI, which was actually from an old DARPA project that had its funding cut because it wasn't close to being good enough for military use. And I say attempted. How the AI is implemented is just a much more complex version of voice commands. It does speech to text then tries to use a bunch of predefined rules to break down the sentence and associate it with pre-existing commands, weighting each outcome with a probability. The problem is this does require training. Lots of it. Which is why the Siri team is supposedly so large.

It was a DARPA project at SRI and was spun off as a company. That does not imply failure at all. The uniqueness is that it's context aware, so you can have mini-conversations about a reminder, say, and Siri will know what you're talking about. That's not easy to do. All effective AI is based on machine learning and requires training. Hell, human beings require training, so I'm not sure why that implies it's not good AI.

I see a lot of folks trying to say Siri isn't ready or Siri isn't much use. I think you're wrong. This really happened in my garage just moments after getting her phone setup:

Wife (a professional musician running late to a gig--as always): Asks me, "Where is Blah House in Dallas?"
Me: "Just ask your phone"
Wife to Siri: "Where is Blah House in Dallas?"
Siri shows map with push pin.
Wife touches push pin
Phone displays address of Blah House in Dallas
Wife punches address into GPS and screeches out of the driveway.

Apple bought Siri. Siri was a spinoff of a government research project. Apple pulled Siri from the iOS store and aborted the almost-released Android version of it.

Let's not be victims of hyperbole. Apple bought a company with a product they knew would market very well, they killed it for other platforms, and they convinced everyone it was an "iPhone 4S feature" rather than just another app. Which is what it was for two years, and none of you apparently knew about.

Why do people insist on spewing this garbage? Oh, you're so smart, no one else knew Siri was originally an app!

I doubt you ever used Siri; instead you've just read about it on the Internet. I on the other hand, used Siri for a little over a year. Trust me, it's not the same as the new incarnation. It's like comparing a bottle rocket to a Saturn 5.

People act like a company buying something is a cop out. News flash, companies aren't people. They're entities made up of people. It's not like Apple put in an off-the-shelf solution into its OS; it identified the *potential* of Siri and essentially hired the people behind it to take it to the next level. What do you think any other company does?

I think the novelty of Siri is already starting to wear off (which is WAY sooner than I expected). I myself was all over the blogs looking at Siri's responses to random questions. My friend I believe put it best, "It was the most entertaining 10 hours of my life. I'm wondering if I'll ever use it again though."

If all you are using it for is the see what it says to random questions, then I agree that this would get old pretty quickly. I would say in less than 2 hrs.

But for me, it has already become the primary way of scheduling meetings, reminders, searches and timers. I already use my iPhone for such things and Siri is without a doubt faster for these things, at least for me.

For short bursts of text, it is faster. I had a list of song titles that I inputted into Notes via Siri. Faster than typing. And combined with iMessage, I've replaced Textfree as the primary way of texting my wife.

So, I would say,the usefulness would depend on how you are using it. If you are using it jokes, it'll get old quick. If you use it to get things done, it is a great tool.

I look forward to them expanding the use into app launching and controlling settings on the phone. "I want to play game X", "Any email?", "Turn off wifi" or "Dim the screen a little".

... This isnt a new notion, he said. In projecting the future, I think Apple did a good job of figuring out when the technology was ready to be consumer-grade. ...

In fact he admits that Siri is useful for consumers. He also downplays Apples achievement by stating that Apple just had to wait to launch Siri.
But its more than likely that Apple did all it could to get Siri where it is now.
He's also forgetting(?) a 5 year DARPA project with 300 top scientists that started it all...
I think that Google and MS are scrambling to get this technology and trying to win time by downplaying it: "its the same, we have it already, its not a big deal, etc.".

And make no mistake, Dragon Naturally Speaking is a far more advanced speech-to-text technology than what's in Siri (it does, of course, lack the "AI").

Um, if I remember correctly, Siri uses the same voice recognition software: Nuance. In fact, Siri isn't voice recognition; it's a contextual AI that utilizes speech recognition software (it can be upgraded to a superior solution in the future).

Also, in my experience, even in noisy environments, Siri is about as accurate as the iPhone's keyboard.

That is unless you stop loathing "clueless newbies" and actually start designing technology that is accessible to anyone without them having to worship at the alter of technology for the sake of the technology.

And by the way, that's the ultimate discipline. Apple is so good at it, they just make it look trivially easy. Don't think so? Show them up! Go on! If it's no big deal, you should be able to do it without copying their look and feel or patents - right?

/crickets

Yup - same old story.... Except Apple has the $$$ and in mobile devices the price advantage.

That's quite smart. I wondered about the use of a short pause to disambiguate the sentence.
Most people speak quite ambiguous, but don't realize that.
They also forget how often other people ask what they mean...

Siri does have a novelty factor, yes. I haven't asked it how much wood a woodchuck could chuck for several days now...

However, I believe the real paradigm shift Siri offers is it's accessibility. We know Apple's MO by now: take existing functionality and make it something people actually want and can use. Apple originally took the computer and gave us the PC; they took clunky smartphones that required a manual to use, and gave us the iPhone. Now they've taken nerdy voice recognition and given us Siri.

Sure, with other solutions you can dictate texts, set calendar appointments, check the weather, etc. However, how many people really used this? It required training, and you had to say things in a predetermined way. My mom would never use it, for instance.

While Siri isn't perfect, it does make voice recognition so easy that my mom can't just do it, she wants to do it. You just talk to it like a person.

This is how you advance technology: you make it accessible and usable to the masses. It's like Prometheus giving us fire.

Whenever a new technology hits the market, those who are most threatened by it are the first to criticize and dismiss it. The fact that Microsoft and Google are finding it necessary to make such comments in public tells me they are so obviously on the defensive. These guys are nothing but tools. When you have no innovations of your own, your only strategy is to smear the innovators. This is not unlike the Republican economic strategy... I mean if they had one.

That's quite smart. I wondered about the use of a short pause to disambiguate the sentence.
Most people speak quite ambiguous, but don't realize that.
They also forget how often other people ask what they mean...

J

People saying Siri isn't perfectly accurate and therefore a failure need to remember this. Not all humans are perfectly accurate. I don't have the best hearing; you know how many times
I ask "What did you say?". Plus when talking on cellphones (AT&T), I repeat myself nearly as much as I repeat myself when using "Raise to Speak".

Typing this on an iPhone, I also retyped typos about as much as I have to fix errors in Siri, maybe more.

I think the novelty of Siri is already starting to wear off (which is WAY sooner than I expected). I myself was all over the blogs looking at Siri's responses to random questions. My friend I believe put it best, "It was the most entertaining 10 hours of my life. I'm wondering if I'll ever use it again though."